The Time Machine Audiobook

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. A dinner party in Richmond, a small machine of brass, ivory and crystal, and an argument about whether mankind can move through the fourth dimension the way it moves through the other three. The Time Traveller says he has already done it, and a week later he comes back through the wall of his own laboratory, starved, blistered, and older than he should be.

What he describes is not a future of flying machines and great cities but the slow erosion of everything: summers that will not end, a people who have forgotten fear because nothing has threatened them for a thousand generations, and beneath them, in the dark of ruined machinery, something that has remembered appetite. Then the machine carries him further, to a beach at the end of the world under a swollen dying sun, where the only living thing left is a thing that hops and screams.

H G Wells wrote this in 1895 and it has never stopped being the template for every time travel story since - but the reason it lasts is not the machine. It is the cold, clear eye he turns on where comfort leads, and how quickly a species can be sorted into the eaten and the eaters.

This unabridged recording keeps the framing of the dinner guests and the Traveller's own voice, dry and precise until the wonder or the horror takes it apart.